


the road to midwinter

by Anysia



Category: Winternight Series - Katherine Arden
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Basically THOSE chapters from WotW from Morozko's POV, Canon Dialogue, Extended Scene, F/M, Memory Loss, Morozko POV, Mutual Pining, Russian Mythology, Winter Solstice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-07 15:42:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21460474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anysia/pseuds/Anysia
Summary: He does not know her, and yet he cannot help but feel that he has lost something dear. [Chapters 16 and 17 of 'Winter of the Witch' from Morozko's POV]
Relationships: Morozko/Vasilisa Petrovna
Comments: 17
Kudos: 143





	the road to midwinter

**Author's Note:**

> I read the entirety of the Winternight series in a single long weekend last month and haven't been able to let these characters go since. In particular, my brain just couldn't stop thinking of what Morozko's prison and the return of his memory might look like from his POV (I still hold fast to the theory that he got his memory back the first time he and Vasya kissed in the bathhouse). Katherine Arden's prose is absolutely beautiful, and I don't have a hope of holding a candle to her, but I do hope I at least did the characters some measure of justice. 
> 
> (Note that this fic contains dialogue from 'Winter of the Witch' — all apologies to Ms. Arden — and contains spoilers for that book.)

**the road to midwinter **

Midnight rises cold and clear as Midwinter turns. It is not a fierce cold, not wreathed with winter winds to drive wayward travelers to misery and ruin beneath boughs of pine, in unforgiving forests. Instead, it is a generous winter, beautiful in its pureness, an inky-black sky spangled with stars casting diamond-light over the banked snowdrifts. 

The winter-king is content. 

And why should he not be, here in Ivan Tomislav’s fine house, succored by the faith and fear of the feasting. The village name is of no consequence, for it is merely one of many, stockaded and ringed with thatched homes, roofs laden with heavy snow and home to any number of peasants who tend to their _ domoviye _ and look to the first coming frost with deference. _ The winter-king rides, _they say at the first snow, and take him to their hearth when he arrives at the height of Midwinter. 

It is tribute enough, Morozko thinks, sipping at the ornate goblet of mead handed to him by a young serving-girl who had been unable to meet his eyes but instead sent anxious looks towards the fair creature beside him, her golden hair glowing in the firelight. 

She stiffens as he leans close to her, breath cold against her ear. “Are you warm, Yelena Tomislavna?” he asks with deliberate, calculated charm. 

The girl’s breath hitches in her throat, doubtless remembering the old stories. She nods quickly, the hands resting over her knees bunching in the fabric of her fine dress. “Yes, my lord,” she murmurs, staring into the rising flames of the fire before them. 

Morozko smiles, a slow easy thing, and raises an eyebrow at the well-arrayed man at the opposite side of the great hall. His dark beard fails to hide the scowl twisting his lips, and his eyes scream his pain even as his voice does not. Every so often, his fingertips stray to his sword belt, and if he thinks the winter-king fails to notice, he does not. 

_ He treads the line between realms, this one, _ Morozko thinks to himself with a faint air of amusement. _ Casts an eye towards a dark land of no return, if only he could spare this girl her fate. _

He affords the man an easy grin as he finishes his mead in a graceful draught. Mortals. So beholden to feeling, to want. He wonders, idly, if the man means to challenge him, at Midwinter no less, when his power rises fierce as the bitterest winter winds. 

The girl, Yelena, follows his gaze, and her face falls, her eyes soft with longing. Morozko watches the look that passes between the two with an air of detached interest, leaning in to once more brush his lips against the girl’s ear. “Fear not for that one,” he murmurs, and Yelena shivers. “He shall have a long life, a brave one, if he attends well this night.” 

And if not, well… there would be pleasure in taking his right as winter-king within Yelena’s soft curves before freezing them both in the unyielding snow.

“As you say, my lord,” she says, and her voice falters even as she tries to hold fast. 

Morozko eyes her with easy indifference, but his gaze once more strays to her betrothed. _ Fool, _ he thinks with no small amount of disdain. _ This one is mine, lest you bring my disfavor upon this village whole. Why not seek another? Why suffer the anguish of yearning for what you cannot have? _

A movement at the corner of his eye, and Morozko turns, just a fraction, to see a serving-girl staring at him. 

Staring, openly, when other maidens would rightly quail and avert their eyes. 

She is a plain thing, in unadorned cloth, hair incongruously short and dark. Her eyes are inscrutable, startling-green, and darkened with some shadow of emotion. 

He notes her presence in the way his eye might cast over a soul not yet his before turning his attention back to Yelena with a soft smile. 

But something pushes at the back of his mind, a bare hint of pressure. It is not something identifiable, and this unnerves him, even as he plies the girl at his side with soft words that have seen countless years and countless maidens. 

He is death. He is winter. He has seen the turn of mankind in countless frosts and season-ends. 

There should not exist anything he cannot quantify.

And yet it stirs.

\---

The serving-girl is a bold thing, with the wilds about her, and Morozko is intrigued despite himself from the moment she spills the first drop of wine, as she raises unflinching eyes to him and commands him, commands _ him_, away with her. 

Yelena is indignant, awash in great waves of fear as she looks to him and offers fervent apologies, soothes what would on another occasion doubtless be the cold anger of the winter-king insulted. 

Instead, Morozko’s gaze follows the girl with no small amount of curiosity. She is restless, staring back at him, her face bright with anger, with frustration, with something fierce and wild. 

But not fear. Nothing even of the shadow of it in the stark lines of her face, the sharp bones. 

_ You have forgotten_, she had said, the words firm, and he had been startled into amusement by her boldness, this scrap of a girl who would dare raise voice against him at the height of Midwinter. There was admiration for that kind of folly, and so he bid her go without penalty. 

But the words linger, much like the strange pressure, in a way, and he will not admit that it unnerves him. He is Morozko, he is Karachun, and he has escorted countless souls to the darkness of eternity. He does not _ forget. _

His eye casts over the girl again, fine mood turning fast enough to ill humor. She is not beautiful by any measure, a pale star beside the golden sun of Yelena beside him. Yet there is… something, something of fire, of the sea, of something beyond these lands in the unflinching stare of her deep green eyes. 

\---

Morozko’s curiosity had only deepened as the girl challenged him, with a fearlessness that even warriors who had dared stand against him did not possess. Even now, bleeding in his arms, she is wild, unrepentant. 

Yelena had become little more than an afterthought, though she had desperately once more offered herself as his bride, as sacrifice for her village, her people, her home. 

But the serving-girl had charged him first with words, defiant in defense of Yelena’s anguished lover, and then with her borrowed blade. There was a familiarity to her stance, to the way she held her weapon that unnerved him further. 

“Are you so eager to die?” he had asked her, and although the winter-king could not, _ did not _fear, the pressure at the base of his skull grew stronger. 

“I thought I knew you,” the girl had rejoined, and his answering anger spoke both to her insouciance and that undefinable thing that slipped once more away from him like the last of winter-ice at the edge of spring. 

_ Once you bid me remember you, _ she had said as they fought, her eyes blazing fire above her steel. 

_ I do not know you, _he had seethed in response, slashed out with his own knife, torn and bloodied her skin, so desperate was he to rid himself of this strange creature with her witch-wood eyes and inscrutable words. 

But there was nothing of guile to the way she spoke, fierce though she may be, and even though he fleetingly thought her mad, this wild girl who would stand before him thus at Midwinter and fight even as she must know she courted death…

The winter-king is old, and seasoned in the ways of men. 

This, he knows, is something more. 

The girl murmurs something about a failure, about words to his horse, and before he can even falter at this — for how could this plain girl know of the white mare, when even he has until this moment forgotten her? — she falls limp in his arms. The shadows gather, stars striking white as the great hall disappears and the endless road turns beneath them. 

Morozko is indifferent to the sufferings of humanity, and one death is meaningless. He knows that he must bear this one away, set her to the road and guide her into the darkness. 

But…

_ What do you know? _ he thinks to himself, cursing under his breath as he draws her back to the land of men. _ How came you here, and what thought you to find? _

Careless of the rising whispers around them, the girl a slight weight in his arms, Morozko carries her from the great hall, into the cold winter night.

\---

He bears her to the nearby bathhouse, more idly curious of the girl’s foolish bravery than else. It is the winter-king’s whimsy, that he should tend to this wild thing, seek the answers to the questions she has brought with her out of the snow. There is no familiarity to her, despite her earlier insistence, and she is still waspish, defiant, even in her injured state. 

There is an old story, passed through the halls of men, by mothers to their children at the hearths of Rus’, about brave-hearted girls like this one. Inside, Morozko smiles with a faint amusement. Fool though she is, she has courage in her blood, and he imagines she has earned the dowry she perhaps seeks — though what man could tame this one or earn her heart, he cannot imagine. 

But his earlier unease returns as he heals her wounds. Morozko watches her with an appraising eye, expects gasps of pain as the water of death mends her flesh, but instead the girl grits her teeth in anticipation, bears up beneath the agony it brings. 

_ She has done this before, _he realizes, a slow, dawning realization. 

He has healed her before.

It is an unthinkable thing, that he would twice have granted favor to a mortal girl, and that he would bear no memory of one he would tend to thus. 

But there can be no mistake when he reaches her palm and sees the white, icy mark of his own touch there in the center of it, long-healed and perfect-white. 

“You know me,” the girl says, in a voice that seems to echo even in the small _ predbannik _of the bathhouse, fierce with conviction. 

It seemed so, and no lie could pass the winter-king unheeded, here at Midwinter. 

And yet… 

Yet how could it be, that he could know this girl and yet not bear the memory of her as surely as she bore his mark at her hand? 

“Tell me who you are,” he bids her, standing straight, cold-blue eyes stern with the authority of his right as winter-king even as some part of him remains unsettled, wary of this girl who eludes him so. 

She remains defiant, infuriatingly so, and he wonders that he has not frozen her heart where she stands even as he feels a swell of admiration for her bravery. 

“Not a prisoner in this village.” Her eyes hold him fast, and he wonders at the words, directed unflinchingly at his own person. A _ prisoner_? He? Feasting and basking in tribute as his season turns, holding court with his people? One night, here at Midwinter — this girl, whatever her quarrel, could not begrudge him this. 

“Eternity. You have forgotten that, too.” 

Full-throated, clear, and unafraid. The girl dares him, and there is an ugly, unpleasant truth to her words even as he cannot grasp them. 

He is the winter-king, and at Midwinter, the world of men should bend to him. _ His _word should be truth. His reality should be at its strongest, unassailable, unbroken.

Yet this girl, this slip of a thing, a nameless wanderer from the road, has told him that he has lost something, perhaps something precious. 

When her scarred hand touches his cheek, something familiar once more shies away from his mind, and he almost believes her then. He catches her wrist, feels the fine bones beneath his fingers, and wonders.

The girl at last sighs and affords him one last sharp comment before announcing her intent to bathe and slipping into the dimmed light of the inner room.

And despite him, he cannot help but heed her, and follow. 

\---

Desire flares up within him, hot and deep, at the sight of her bare skin in flashes of candlelight, and he cannot understand it. 

She is not Yelena, with her full, supple curves and milk-pale skin. The girl carries countless scars on her bony limbs, and she is skittish as a doe, flushing under his appraising gaze even as her own eyes cannot seem to stop their study of his bared flesh. Morozko is unconcerned by his own nakedness — he is not a man, merely an approximation of one, and he rarely has cause to give his body thought. 

Ah, but the girl. Her eyes wander, seeing him in low light, the curve of his throat, the smooth plane of his chest, the long and graceful fingers of his hands. He does not care to hide his amusement as her flush deepens when she first gazes at his manhood, half-hard through mere consequence of her perusal. 

A maiden, then. A near certainty until now, but doubtless an unpracticed girl, untouched. She sits on the bench across from him, draws her knees to her chest and tries to hide the naked longing in her eyes. 

Morozko has seen enough of men, heard enough desperate pleas for mercy to know that look, and wonders what she might have thought he was to her, once. 

What he might have been in truth. 

“Will you not tell me your secret?” he asks, idly, leaning back. 

“What secret? My people have need of you.”

She is many things, this girl. Brave. Clever. Strong. But duplicitous, she is not. Lies die unheeded on her tongue. “No,” Morozko says in a low voice, and his eyes do not leave hers. “There is something else. Something there in your face every time you look at me.” 

The girl falls silent, some flash of dark pain and old memory across her face in the candlelight, and he does not press further. 

Idle words pass between them as the fire burns to embers, as the light slowly fades. The girl’s eyes are dark, and Morozko wonders if perhaps once this girl was just another maiden, one of many whose hearts he turned for his own amusement. 

The white mare had snorted her irritation at him once, that he should treat them so cruelly, for mortal hearts are frail and easily broken. But to the winter-king, it was but a trifle, and anyway he was generous with his gifts to those girls who fell weeping into the snow. In time he was but a fond memory of girlish youth to look upon over long winter nights, when girls had become women with babes in their arms. 

But this girl… to treat _ this _girl thus…

It seemed ill-done, if done in truth, and Morozko thinks once more of what this girl might have been to him even as she rises, naked and beautiful, and moves slowly towards him, her eyes holding him whole. 

The candles burn brighter as he forgets that there was not light enough to gaze upon her as she kneels before him. One hand comes up to cradle his face, and he turns, presses a kiss to her healed palm and tastes his own ice against his lips. 

The girl’s shoulders are trembling, and he has borne enough girls into the darkness at Midwinter to know that this is not fear. 

_ Please, _he hears, a whisper, an entreaty, and he knows, somehow, in what could ever be of a death-god’s heart, that he cannot deny her. 

He kisses her, one hand tangled in her dark hair. 

The road turns, the world brightens, and somewhere, in the spangled starlight of Midnight, chains fall away as easily as water through his palms. 

The girl, frostbitten and afraid within the walls of his house in the forest. 

The girl, astride a great bay stallion, defiant and fierce as his brother rose up before her. 

The girl in his arms, near death but brave, so brave and clinging to life with both hands. 

His talisman, his soul resting safely against her skin, then pale water as she broke from his duplicity and forged her own path. 

Her green eyes, her dark hair in moonlight as he took her into his arms and kissed her, held her tight and feared as he did not know he could, even as he _ wanted. _

The feel of her hands, tight against his shoulders, her lips branding fire, her blood hot on his skin as she _ lived_, as she dragged him to Moscow and bade him call the snow, save her people, save _ his_.

Memories, tumbling end over end, all in one white-hot rush as he kisses her, as Medved’s prison breaks apart like splintered ice, as he _ remembers. _

_ Vasya. _

She is alive. 

She is _ here_, against all hope that she might be.

But is that not the way of his wild girl, to do those things men and _ chyerti _alike deemed impossible? Morozko feels the weight of years return, the endless turnings of winter and the cries of countless souls borne across to the darkness, and there is a great, heavy pain to it. Yet in this moment he would bear it a thousand times hence for this girl in his arms, alive and hale, having somehow ridden into the heart of Midnight and broken the chains the Bear had wrapped tight around him. 

Her skin burns hot against his own coolness, and he has never felt desire like this, not since the earliest moonrise of mankind, the first girl laid bare to him as sacrifice in the snow. Vasya clings to him, kisses him fiercely, and he can only rise to her, hold her close and allow his mouth and hands to express what words cannot. 

“Afraid now?” he asks after they break apart, as he holds her, trembling and bare, in his lap. He cannot stop touching her, skating his hands across her ribs, her collarbones, gently cupping her breasts and listening to the soft hitching of her breath. 

“I’m supposed to be frightened. I am a maiden,” she says, churlish and defiant, and he smiles at her without malice. For the winter-king has no heart, _ should _not, and yet he cannot restrain the eternal swell of affection for her, the warmth and fondness, the open yearning. 

And the desire, as she squirms in his lap, flushing at the growing hardness pressed against the small of her back. 

_ As I could, I loved you. _

Oh, he could, and it is still a frightful thing, to feel love. 

Yet if it leads thus, to Vasya in his arms, to the strengthening bond between them even in the absence of the jewel with which he had vainly tried to bind her, he will bear it hence and not count the cost. 

There is urgency growing at the back of his mind, and it presses down like a heavy weight — there is a war to be fought, the Bear to be bound once more anew, the _ chyerti _to preserve before they are all of them forgotten. Vasya, for all she holds his heart, is the bridge, the keystone, and she has a far greater role to play in this grand game that threatens both their realms. There is a gravity thus, and they should hasten from Midnight, he and Vasya, to the world of men. 

And yet…

And yet he once more hears Vasya’s screams, echoing across the streets of Moscow, and remembers his anguish, his desperation as he’d sought his brother, traded his freedom for her life without hesitation. 

Thrice now he has nearly lost her to the darkness. 

And now, here, she is alive, her eyes dark with desire, her body trembling with the joy he knows unsteadies his own hands even as they stroke over her skin. 

“I will not hurt you,” Morozko says, and it is soft, as he once bade her be when she lay dying in his arms and he felt a fear for her that he did not know could exist within him. 

Vasya inhales a deep, shuddery breath, presses her forehead against his and kisses him again, slower, more deliberate, tilting her head and cradling his face in her palms the way he had once taught her as they clung together in moonlight. She is a maiden, pure as the first winter snow, and yet her body sings its want in the slow roll of her hips, the press of her chest against his, yearning for a touch, a pleasure she cannot know, nor name. 

Morozko bears her into his arms, still kissing her, the power of his sight in the cold brightness of his season easily leading him into the _ predbannik. _There are thick furs of purest white gathered up on the smooth wooden floor, and he lays his beloved against the softness, presses kisses to the line of her jaw, her cheek, the hollow of her throat. 

There are no words spoken between them into the candlelight, only the sounds of their breathing, of the quiet flicker of flame, of Vasya’s dove-soft cries as Morozko bends his dark head and takes lips and tongue to the soft curve of her breast. 

She is brave in this as any challenge, his witch-girl. Even as her breath quickens and her hands tangle in his hair, she does not shy from his mouth’s tender exploration, and Morozko curves a faint smile against her skin as she urges him to touch and coax her higher towards something he knows she cannot name. Her breath is short and sharp as he moves lower, and Vasya’s fingers twine with his as he strokes her hip and sets his mouth to the heat between her legs. She is fever-bright, with the taste of the river and the road about her, keening as he laps and delves and takes his feast within her, reveling in what he is given freely.

He does not stop until she crests, her voice a loud, throaty cry against the wooden walls of the bathhouse. There is nothing of a demure maiden to the way Vasya takes her pleasure, and she tugs his hair to the roots as her legs tremble and she falls apart beneath him. Morozko raises his head, after, an arrogant twitch of his lips even as they shine with her moisture across them. He forgets that his mouth is slicked with her and allows Vasya to draw him into her arms, her trembling hips falling open and settling at either side of his. 

She is frightened, his brave girl, and Morozko slides one arm beneath her back, drawing her into a kiss even as he takes himself in hand. There are no words as he pulls back to watch her face, merely a fraught, heavy moment between them, and although she would not say it thus, bright love in Vasya’s eyes as he presses into her, slowly. 

To his surprise, she lets out a huff of irritation after a moment, moving one hand to clutch at his hip, eyes going dark as she urges him forward. There is too much unspoken and breathed here into these stolen moments in Midnight to tarry, and Morozko drops his head to her shoulder, brings her legs up around his waist and makes love to her in earnest. 

It is not long, their first joining, though it is easy with heedless joy and uncomplicated pleasure. Vasya clings to him as she crests once more, and Morozko holds her to him and presses kisses to her skin as he spills like water inside her. They are both damp with sweat — hers, for the winter-king is not a man — and he gathers Vasya to his chest, strokes her hair and breathes with her.

This moment, he knows in some corner of his mind, is perhaps a defilement by the rules of men, that he should take Vasya to his body thus when she is not his by the sacraments they hold dear. Yet he has remembered, in the touch of her skin, the taste of her lips, the pulse of his body in hers. He has remembered the _ chyerti _and the road to Moscow. He has remembered the task before him to bind his brother anew. He has remembered the bridge that this girl must forge between two worlds, from whence he had seen fit to save her from the fire. 

And he has remembered her. He has remembered Vasya, whom he loved, still loves as he could. 

As he does. 

That is enough.

Her hand is splayed against his chest, her head resting against his shoulder, and the moment is an easy one, two bodies twined together in fading candlelight. 

The weight of what must be done is growing closer, and he knows that soon Vasya must know all he remembers. He will breathe her name and bid the memories return in full-force, break this gentle silence between them and once more set her on the road to Moscow. 

But for now, Morozko is the winter-king, and this is his land, his right, his season. 

For now, he bears his beloved in his arms and grants her, grants them both peace. 


End file.
